Modi's AI Spectacle: Chaos and Deception in New Delhi

by Riaz Haq

Feb 19

The India AI Impact Summit 2026, held at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, has been marred by chaos, confusion and deception. The events on the ground have produced unintended media headlines for India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi who wants to be seen as the "vishwaguru" (teacher of the world) in the field of artificial intelligence as well. First, there was massive chaos on the opening day, with long lines and sudden unannounced evacuation of exhibitors and attendees from the show floor for several hours. This, the Indian government said, was done for "VIP" security, a euphemism for Mr. Modi's "photo op" as he walked the venue halls alone for the benefit of the cameras for self-promotion. Mr. Modi then declared that "India is not just a part of the AI revolution, but is leading and shaping it". To support such claims, an Indian University presented a "robodog" bought from China as its "innovation", a blatant lie that was immediately caught by people on the social media, leading to the expulsion of the institution from the show. 

5-Layer AI Stack

Let's examine Mr. Modi's claim to be "leading and shaping" the AI revolution. The artificial intelligence technology is a 5-layer stack, consisting of energy, AI chips, infrastructure, AI models and applications. Only two nations, the United States and China, have their own full 5-layer stacks. It's hard to see India as leading in any one of these layers. 

Currently, the AI space is dominated by China, the US and a handful of hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. Any country wanting to jump on the AI bandwagon has to choose between the American and Chinese giants. Bloomberg put it best as follows:

"This, fundamentally, is a matter of sovereignty: Whether a nation’s AI systems can be independent of foreign authority. That danger was showcased in 2024, when members of Australia’s UniSuper pension fund had access to their accounts cut off due to a Google cloud misconfiguration. In October, Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud services — the world’s largest — also suffered a major shutdown, damaging its reputation". 

Strict security restrictions at the Indian AI summit caused significant limitations on carrying personal items, including laptops and other electronic devices.  In spite of such "strict security", some participants reported their exhibits and personal items stolen at the event. The fact that only cash was accepted for food and other services at the venue for the AI Summit makes a mockery of the Modi government's hype about India's digital public infrastructure (DPI). 

India's Galgotias University of Uttar Pradesh Showed Chinese Robodog as its Own

There is a significant presence of Americans at the AI Summit in New Delhi. Major "hyperscalers" like Anthropic, Google and OpenAI and Microsoft executives are all attending. The American agenda at the conference was put very succinctly by Sriram Krishnan, Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence, who said, "...We want to make sure that the world uses the American AI stack...We also want the world to use our AI model...We want all our allies, including India, to leverage our AI infrastructure."

Major US technology firms have announced plans to build large multi-gigawatt AI data centers in India that make enormous demands on energy and water for powering and cooling the energy-hungry beasts. They are facing strong resistance in US cities and towns because of concerns that they will divert precious water and power, increase the rates they have to pay and cause pollution. India appears to be welcoming them for the investment they bring, in spite of significant health and safety concerns. But the Americans will not guarantee "data sovereignty" to the Indian government for Indian consumers' data stored in these data centers. 

President Donald Trump has recently scrapped greenhouse gas emission regulations to enable the use of fossil fuels to power AI data centers in the United States. But the local opposition by cities and towns continues to gather steam. 

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  • Riaz Haq

    ADAM
    @AdameMedia
    BREAKING: 🚨 🇮🇳 🇺🇸 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 AI WIPES OUT $50 BILLION from Indian OUTSOURCING companies

    In 2026, so far:
    Nifty IT is down 20.77%
    TCS is down 19.95%.
    Infosys is down 21%.
    Wipro is down 24%.
    HCL Tech is down 17%.

    For nearly 30 years, global corporations relied on Indian firms for cheap labour.

    AI capability is increasing, meaning work previously outsourced to Indian teams at lower cost can be outsourced to AI at an even lower cost.

    I’ve seen this myself in my ten year white collar career at three SP500 companies. It’s only accelerated over time.

    Market Research organisations warn that economies heavily dependent on white collar outsourcing could face disproportionate disruption as AI driven productivity accelerates.

    India sits directly at the center of that transition.

    https://x.com/AdameMedia/status/2026534748516925834?s=20

    --------------

    Market Crashed on AI Fears, CITRINI Research Report Sent Tremors All over the World

    https://www.youtube.com/live/OteLI9ZJvDg?si=Up5XtewuD_VquY19

    on Wednesday

  • Riaz Haq

    The artificial intelligence “scare trade” erupted again on Monday as growing concerns about the disruptive power of AI dragged down shares of delivery, payments and software companies, and sent International Business Machines Corp. to its worst plunge in 25 years.

    It began after a bearish report was published over the weekend by a little known firm called Citrini Research.
    The report, released on social media Sunday, outlined the potential risks to various segments of the global economy, using hypothetical scenarios set in the future, specifically calling out food delivery services and credit card companies as ones facing trouble.

    Citrini Research, founded by James van Geelen, presented a scenario set in June 2028 where AI’s disruption has caused mass unemployment for white collar workers, declining consumer spending, software-backed loan defaults and economic contraction. Still, the report notes clearly — “What follows is a scenario, not a prediction.”

    Alap Shah, co-author of a Citrini Research report and CIO of Lotus Technology Management joined Bloomberg China Show to discuss.

    https://youtu.be/xsdpKcFwpt4?si=3pqTkEUmzhXD02A5


    AI Overview
    Agentic AI is expected to significantly transform, rather than simply eliminate, the job market by shifting the focus from manual task execution to the management of AI systems. While some entry-level and repetitive cognitive roles are at risk of automation, the technology is poised to create new positions, resulting in a shift in required skills rather than a total replacement of the human workforce.
    McKinsey & Company
    McKinsey & Company
    +2
    Key Impacts on Jobs
    Job Transformation > Replacement: AI is more likely to change job roles, with 54% of jobs expected to be "moderately" transformed and only a small percentage fully automated.
    High-Risk Areas: Entry-level roles, data entry, administrative positions, and routine content creation are most exposed to automation.
    Massive Productivity Gains: Agentic AI can operate with high autonomy, with projections indicating it could manage 15% of day-to-day work decisions by 2028.
    New Role Creation: The rise of agentic AI is creating new jobs, such as AI trainers, AI ethics officers, AI system managers, and "M-shaped" supervisors.
    YouTube
    YouTube
    +6
    Impact on Specific Industries
    White-Collar Work: Technologies like Claude Code are already reshaping computer-based jobs, with some predictions suggesting up to 50% of entry-level white-collar roles could be impacted within 1–5 years.
    Finance & Tech: These sectors are seeing the largest potential for disruption,, with some reports suggesting a potential for 60-80% of development jobs to be impacted by agentic coding.
    Logistics & Customer Service: Agentic AI is already being used for end-to-end customer query resolution and supply chain optimization, replacing traditional support roles.
    Gartner
    Gartner
    +5
    Essential Human Skills for the Future
    To remain competitive, workers will need to focus on skills that are difficult for AI to replicate, including:
    AI Fluency: The ability to use, manage, and collaborate with AI tools.
    Complex Problem-Solving & Judgment: Human oversight is still essential for tasks requiring, ethical decision-making, and high-stakes judgment.
    Emotional Intelligence & Creativity: Skills in areas like, care, and high-level strategy.
    Gartner
    Gartner
    +3
    Conclusion
    Agentic AI is moving from simple automation to, autonomous execution of workflows. While this will lead to a "painful" reshaping of some industries, it is also expected to enhance human productivity and create new, more strategic roles for those who adapt to working alongside AI, rather than resisting it.
    McKinsey & Company
    McKinsey & Company
    +4

    on Thursday

  • Riaz Haq

    India Built the World’s Back Office. A.I. Is Starting to Shrink It.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/technology/india-technology-jobs...

    Artificial intelligence promises to automate the white-collar work that made India a tech powerhouse. The country is racing to adapt before it’s too late.

    In Gurugram, the sprawling tech suburb outside New Delhi, Krishna Khandelwal is using artificial intelligence to build an army of chatbots designed to eliminate the kind of jobs that once lifted India into the ranks of the world’s fastest-growing economies.

    Since last summer, his start-up, Hunar.AI, has offered companies bespoke A.I. voice agents that steer job applicants through virtually every step of the hiring process, from résumé screening to orientation.

    “For onboarding,” he said in an interview in the company’s headquarters in a shared work space, “you don’t need humans at all.”



    For a quarter century, India has made itself the world’s back office, providing an educated, English-speaking work force to do tasks more cheaply than in the United States or Europe. The industry today employs more than six million people and is worth nearly $300 billion, more than 7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

    Now, A.I. threatens to do to India what its outsourcing model did to the rest of the world: replace hundreds of thousands of office workers.

    Economies everywhere are bracing for an era in which A.I. tools automate entire categories of white-collar work, but the brunt could fall hardest on India, undermining two decades of effort to climb the value chain and establish a place in the global tech world.

    “It’s a matter of time,” said Deedy Das, a partner at Menlo Ventures, an investment firm that closely tracks A.I. “Markets are pretty efficient. If a tool exists that does a job cheaper, it will be adopted,” he said. “I’m surprised it hasn’t happened at a faster clip, but it will.”

    The tremors are already being felt. Tata Consultancy Services, one of India’s largest employers, has shrunk its work force to 580,000, a decline of more than 20,000 from a peak in 2022, when it hired 100,000 new workers in one year alone.

    Its main rival, Infosys, has also slowed hiring, while dozens of smaller start-ups laid off workers across the country in 2025, according to Inc42, a digital economy news outlet in India.

    Graduates of the country’s universities and technical colleges are finding fewer openings, forcing them to scramble to “upskill,” an increasingly popular term in the context of learning the A.I. technology that is reshaping the industry.

    Tech stocks in India were already slumping this year, but a speculative report on Feb. 22 by Citrini Research, an analytics company based in the United States, sent them spiraling, by painting a doomsday scenario about A.I.’s impact on India in particular.

    “The entire model was built on one value proposition: Indian developers cost a fraction of their American counterparts,” the report said, imagining the world in the not-so-distant future of 2028. “But the marginal cost of an A.I. coding agent had collapsed to, essentially, the cost of electricity.”

    Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister since 2014, has recognized the challenge. Like many leaders, he has pledged to make the country an A.I. power, including by overseeing international deals and urging the country’s own software engineers to develop new technologies and export them to the world.


    “There have been certain turning points that have shaped entire countries,” Mr. Modi said during an international conference on A.I. in New Delhi last month, according to a translation of his remarks. “These turning points set the direction of civilization and transform the pace of development. Artificial intelligence is one such transformation in history.”


    It is far from clear, however, whether India is positioned to make that transformation. While it has a highly educated work force, it lacks the infrastructure and natural resources needed to power A.I. products.

    yesterday